


I'm vengeance.

by uncontrollablyyours



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Bruce Wayne is Batman, Drabble, Gen, Young Batman, angry baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:01:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27974843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uncontrollablyyours/pseuds/uncontrollablyyours
Summary: The ramblings of an early Batman. Rage, anger, vengeance.
Kudos: 4





	I'm vengeance.

**Author's Note:**

> Very much inspired by The Batman (2022) trailer. I cannot express into words how excited for it I am, so instead I wrote some shit!

My mother was a woman who smiled easily. It seemed to be in her nature to constantly smile, even when she was sad or hurting. In every family portrait, there was a girly grin plastered on her face. I faintly remember my father’s fond annoyance whenever my mother couldn’t help but smile even in the portraits that were supposed to be formal. But she never was just formal. She wasn’t rigid and stiff like her lifestyle expected her to be.

I can still hear her, sometimes. Her laugh. I can still feel her smile on my cheek whenever she brought her lips to kiss me good night. I can still see her dancing along the hallways of the manor, smiling at whatever Alfred and the cook had prepared for dinner, or whatever little new feat I was boasting about at breakfast.

I’m sure she wasn’t always happy. But I rarely saw her not being that. Whenever I was to be reprimanded, it was always my father with the stern face, and I would run to my mother’s lap as if it would solve the problem, which is exactly what it felt like when I was in her arms. It was my father who I would end up resenting after an argument, and not her. Never her.

But even though I rarely saw it, I can imagine her eyes downcast and sad. Maybe it was there when I was a kid, but when you’re young you avoid looking at the cracks. Especially when your life was as perfect as mine was. But although my father was a great man, he wasn’t perfect. I knew he failed her sometimes. I myself threw tantrums when his profession took him away from us. I knew it must have her hurt her too.

I remember my favorite memory of her smile. It was the Christmas morning when I was nine years old, completely oblivious to the realities of life. I knew nothing outside the walls of the manor, outside of the cook’s delicious meals, outside the world of my father and my mother. I was just given a long coveted Zorro action figure, one that I’m sure my father had been depriving me of simply for me to look forward to something for the holidays. I felt as if I was the happiest human being alive as I dashed around the hallway, boasting of my gift to Alfred and any others of the help who would listen. But I quickly realized that I wasn’t, for my mother’s radiant smile proved me wrong.

“Oh, Thomas,” she pulled him into her arms so easily, and then they were both laughing. It was there. I could feel it. The love between them felt tangible, something that one could feel with his hands if he just tried hard enough. “I thought we agreed no presents this year,” she said into his shoulder. My father simply laughed. “You know I can’t resist.” I wanted to come over and join the moment, but it was already so perfect. In fact, I was perfectly content just standing there in awe of the moment they were sharing. He pulled her away and took the necklace from her hands. She pushed her dark hair to the side as he placed the necklace on her. The pearls were perfectly beautiful, but nowhere as immaculate as the look on my mother’s face.

It makes me angry that this beautiful memory is forever tainted by that night. The way her pearls fell one by one on the ground, the sound of it breaking coinciding with her scream, with mine. It angers me that _every_ memory is tainted by that night, that every memory of her smile is painful because of that night. It makes me angry… it truly does. It’s been more than a decade, and the rage is still burning in my chest wherever I go and whatever I’m doing. Her smile was the most beautiful thing in the world. And now even thinking of it makes me want to cry.

Alfred doesn’t say it, but I can tell he’s angry too. He loved them, and I know they loved him too. But he isn’t just angry at that. He’s angry with what it’s done to me, how I go out every night dressed as a bat, answering crime with a punch in the face. He’s angry with how I come home every night with bruises and cuts, with the scars on my body. He’s angry, I know, but he doesn’t say it. He doesn’t have to.

The anger helps, I guess, with most things. Alfred’s anger keeps him waiting for me every night, with a tray of antiseptics, ointments, bandages. My anger keeps me going out at night, constantly willing to bleed for the crime and corruption that is ubiquitous in Gotham.

A Gothamite can never fully explain why he or she chooses to stay in Gotham. A lot of people recommend moving to Metropolis, which in truth isn’t a bad decision. Where Gotham fails, Metropolis succeeds. It’s not perfect, but people are constantly fighting for a way for it to be so. And because of that, it becomes the ideal. But there is something about Gotham that keeps its residents tethered, despite it all. One can easily point out the inescapable debts, the syndicates which are after them, the bosses that threaten them. One can easily say they hate the city, and truly they do. But at their core, a Gothamite never is able to really leave Gotham. A part of them stays. Always. People say that residents of Gotham are cold and cruel, but it’s only because of the horrors that they deal with every day. It’s only because of the dangers of getting beaten up in the streets, or having your parents shot down in an alley. People resort to being cold. Cruel. It’s the only way we know how.

I think of this whenever I’m punching a criminal in his face, whenever his blood sticks to my gloves and paints the street. I’m angry. I’m angry at the dangers he is posing to others, at the way he is so alike with the man who killed them. Sometimes, I lose myself in the process and imagine it is him who I’m hitting, even when he isn’t. But a voice chimes in, every time. This criminal is no more than a victim of a system which has oppressed him, which has left him to unaware or unable to seek for other opportunities other than crime. But then this thought—although an obvious one—angers me. It feels me with a fury that I know is wrong and misplaced, but nevertheless there. When I excuse their actions, justify their procedures, it feels like I’m doing the same for that man in the alley, with the gun, the man who took them from me. And all I end up being is angry at myself.

After all these years, I still feel like I’m trapped in that night. In my ten year old body, my knobby knees pressed to the ground, their blood under my fingernails, over my shirt. I can still feel the sobs hurling their way out of my throat, incoherent sounds coming out. The sound of the police cars rushing through, the officers who took me away, the ones who covered their bodies. The only thing that separates me from that night is the fact that in that moment of a decade and past ago, there was no anger. No, the rage that presently refuses to leave came after. In that moment, there was only pain.

I know the questions pouring over Gotham… who is this Bat-Man, and why is he doing this? The corruption in Gotham drips all over the city all the time—who is this threat to normalcy? Who is this attempt at revolution? More importantly, why? Why now? Why ever? The truth isn’t the noble thing everyone wants it to be. Everyone wants it to be a man who has grown fed up with this life, a man of the streets, a man who is victim to a system. If I’m being honest, I want to think of it that way too. Maybe in a way, in some other angle to look at all this, it is. But the true, human, fact that I cannot ever deny to myself is this: it is vengeance. _It is my vengeance._


End file.
